The present invention is an improvement on the equipment in U.S. Pat. No. 4,467,502 which describes and claims such a rotary fiber bale opener, and the contents of that patent are incorporated hereinto by reference to the extent not inconsistent with the disclosure set forth herein.
Equipment made in accordance with that prior patent has been quite successful, but as higher and higher processing rates are required by equipment which it feeds, improvements became necessary.
In particular, the annular area in which bales were disposed could not hold enough bales for the large volume of processing necessary. Accordingly, it became necessary to lengthen the radius of that annular area from about 5 feet up to around 6 to 10 feet and to double the beater capacity in order to provide for today's requirements of the amount of plucked fibers needed per unit of time. Doubling the number of bales from 20 to 40 in the annular area is possible upon an increase in the diameter of the outer circle from 22 feet to 28 feet.
Such changes caused some problems to develop in that merely doubling the number of rotary beaters did not prove satisfactory and in that the pull of the fibers from the bales by the longer length rotary beaters became non-uniform along the length of the beaters.